Chapter I A Retrospect_Native Life in South Africa Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion

Ver.04.29.93*END*

This etext was prepared by Alan R. Light (alight@vnet.net, formerly

alight@mercury.interpath.net, etc.). To assure a high quality text,

the original was typed in (manually) twice and electronically compared.

Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since

the European War and the Boer Rebellion

By Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

[South African (ethnic Tswana) Editor, Author, Statesman. 1876?-1932.]

First Secretary-General of the South African Native National Congress

(forerunner of the ANC), 1912-1917. Author of "Mhudi",

generally considered the first novel written by a black South African.

[The two portraits are not available for this ASCII text. They are titled

"The Author." and "Mrs. S. T. Plaatje. Without whose loyal co-operation

this book would never have been written."]

[Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are CAPITALIZED.

Some obvious errors have been corrected (see Notes).]

Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since

the European War and the Boer Rebellion

By Sol. T. Plaatje

Editor of `Tsala ea Batho', Kimberley, S.A.

Author of `Sechuana Proverbs and their European Equivalents'

Fourth Edition

Foreword (Native Life in South Africa electronic text):

Sol Plaatje began work on `Native Life in South Africa' in 1914,

while on his way to Britain to plead with the Imperial Government

against the Natives' Land Act of 1913, as part of a deputation

of the South African Native National Congress. The book was intended

as a means of reaching the British public with the deputation's message.

The method seemed sound enough -- it was quite similar in form

to the successful deputation which had pleaded to keep Bechuanaland

(modern Botswana) under direct Imperial control in 1895.

But circumstances were different in 1914 -- South Africa

had been granted self-government, and the First World War began

shortly after the deputation's arrival in England and distracted all parties.

This latter event also influenced the final form of the book,

as Plaatje played to the patriotic sentiment so strong in Britain at the time.

For all his appeals, Plaatje did not succeed: the Act went on to become

one of the first steps toward the system of Apartheid. For all that,

there is sometimes in defeat the seeds of victory -- these troubles

united black South Africans like nothing before, and Plaatje's successors,

in the form of the ANC, finally succeeded in the early 1990's.

The Natives' Land Act of 1913, which forbade natives to buy or rent land,

except in a few small reserves consisting largely of wasteland,

was finally overturned in 1991.

Thanks should be given to Neil Parsons, for his advice on this subject,

and for being so kind as to research and write the introduction that follows.

Alan R. Light

July, 1998.

Monroe, North Carolina (USA).

Introduction, by Neil Parsons

"Native Life in South Africa" is one of the most remarkable books on Africa,

by one of the continent's most remarkable writers. It was written

as a work of impassioned political propaganda, exposing the plight

of black South Africans under the whites-only government of newly unified

South Africa. It focuses on the effects of the 1913 Natives' Land Act

which introduced a uniform system of land segregation between the races.

It resulted, as Plaatje shows, in the immediate expulsion of blacks,

as "squatters", from their ancestral lands in the Orange Free State

now declared "white". But Native Life succeeds in being

much more than a work of propaganda. It is a vital social document

which captures the spirit of an age and shows the effects of rural segregation

on the everyday life of people.

Solomon Tshekeisho Plaatje was born in 1878 in the lands of

the Tswana-speaking people, south of Mafeking. His origins

were ordinary enough. What was remarkable was the aptitude he showed

for education and learning after a few years schooling under the tuition

of a remarkable liberal German Lutheran missionary, the Rev. Ludorf.

At the age of sixteen Plaatje (using the Dutch nickname of his grandfather

as a surname) joined the Post Office as a mail-carrier in Kimberley,

the diamond city in the north of Cape Colony. He subsequently passed

the highest clerical examination in the colony, beating every white candidate

in both Dutch and typing.

From Kimberley the young Plaatje went on to Mafeking, where he was

one of the key players in the great siege of 1899-1900.

As magistrate's interpreter he was the vital link between

the British civil authorities and the African majority

beleaguered inside the town's military perimeter. Plaatje's diaries

from this period, published long after his death, are a remarkable record

both of the siege and of his early prose experimentation --

mixing languages and idioms, and full of bright humour.

After the war Plaatje became a journalist, editor first

of one Tswana language newspaper at Mafeking and then of another at Kimberley.

Like other educated Africans he came out of the war optimistic that

the British would enfranchise all educated and propertied males

in the defeated Boer colonies (Transvaal and Orange Free State)

without regard to race. But in this he, and the others,

were soon sorely disappointed. The British gave a whites-only franchise

to the defeated Boers and thus conceded power to a Boer or white Afrikaner

parliamentary majority in the 1910 Union of South Africa

which brought together the two Boer colonies with Cape Colony and Natal.

Clinging to the old but diminished "colour blind" franchise of the Cape,

Plaatje remained one of the few Africans in South Africa

with a parliamentary vote.

Plaatje's aggravation with the British government can be seen

in an unpublished manuscript of 1908-09 titled "Sekgoma -- the Black Dreyfus".

In this booklet he castigated the British for denying legal rights

(specifically habeas corpus) to their African subjects

outside the Cape Colony.

Plaatje became politically active in the "native congress" movement

which represented the interests of educated and propertied Africans

all over South Africa. He was the first secretary-general

of the "South African Native National Congress", founded in 1912

(which renamed itself as the African National Congress or ANC

ten years later).

The first piece of major legislation presented to the whites-only

parliament of South Africa was the Natives' Land Act, eventually passed

in 1913, which was designed to entrench white power and property rights

in the countryside -- as well as to solve the "native problem" of

African peasant farmers working for themselves and denying their labour power

to white employers.

The main battle ground for the implementation of the new legislation

was the Orange Free State. White farmers took the cue from the Land Act

to begin expelling black peasants from their land as "squatters",

while the police began to rigorously enforce the pass-laws

which registered the employment of Africans and prescribed

their residence and movement rights.

The Free State became the cockpit of resistance by the newly formed SANNC.

Its womens' league demonstrated against pass law enforcement

in Free State towns. Its national executive sent a delegation to England,

icluding Plaatje, who set sail in mid-1914. The British crown retained

ultimate rights of sovereignty over the parliament and government

of South Africa, with an as yet unexercised power of veto over

South African legislation in the area of "native affairs".

The delegation received short shrift from the government in London which was,

after all, more than preoccupied with the coming of the Great War --

in which it feared for the loyalty of the recently defeated Afrikaners

and wished in no way to offend them. But, rather than return empty-handed

like the rest of the SANNC delegation, Plaatje decided

to stay in England to carry on the fight. He was determined to recuit,

through writing and lecturing, the liberal and humanitarian establishment

to his side -- so that it in turn might pressure the British government.

Thus it was that Plaatje resumed work on a manuscript he had begun

on the ship to England. "Native Life in South Africa".

The book was published in 1916 by P. S. King in London.

It was dedicated to Harriette Colenso, doughty woman camnpaigner

who had inherited from her father, Bishop Colenso, the mantle of advocate

to the British establishment of the rights of the Zulu nation in South Africa.

While in England Plaatje pursued his interests in language and linguistics

by collaborating with Professor Daniel Jones of the University of London --

inventor of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and prototype for

Professor Higgins in Shaw's "Pygmalion" and thus the musical "My Fair Lady".

In the same year as Native Life was published, 1916, Plaatje published

two other shorter books which brought together the European languages

(English, Dutch and German) he loved with the Tswana language.

"Sechuana Proverbs" was a listing of Tswana proverbs with

their European equivalents. "A Sechuana Reader" was co-authored with Jones,

using the IPA for Tswana orthography.

Plaatje returned to South Africa but went once again to England

after the war's end, to lead a second SANNC delegation keen to make its mark

on the peace negotiations in 1919. This time Plaatje managed to get

as far as the prime minister, Lloyd George, "the Welsh wizard".

Lloyd George was duly impressed with Plaatje and undertook

to present his case to General Jan Smuts in the South African government,

a supposedly liberal fellow-traveller. But Smuts, whose notions of liberalism

were patronizingly segregationist, fobbed off Lloyd George

with an ingenuous reply.

Disillusioned with the flabby friendship of British liberals,

Plaatje was increasingly drawn to the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois,

president of the NAACP in the United States. In 1921 Plaatje sailed

for the United States on a lecture tour that took him through

half the country. He paid his own way by publishing and selling

18,000 copies of a booklet titled "The Mote and the Beam: an Epic

on Sex-Relationship 'twixt Black and White in British South Africa"

at 25 cents each. In the following year, after Plaatje had left,

this new edition of "Native Life in South Africa" was published,

by the NAACP newspaper "The Crisis" edited by Du Bois.

Plaatje returned home to Kimberley to find the SANNC a spent force,

despite its name change to ANC, overtaken by more radical forces.

At a time when white power was pushing ahead with an ever more intense

segregationist programme, based on anti-black legislation,

Plaatje became a lone voice for old black liberalism. He turned from politics

and devoted the rest of his life to literature. His passion for Shakespeare

resulted in mellifluous Tswana translations of five plays

from "Comedy of Errors" to "Merchant of Venice" and "Julius Caesar".

His passion for the history of his people, and of his family in particular,

resulted in a historical novel, "Mhudi (An Epic of South African Native Life

a Hundred Years Ago)", dedicated to his daughter Olive who had died

in the influenza epidemic while Plaatje was overseas --

described in the dedication as "one of the many victims of a settled system".

"Mhudi" was published by the missionary press at Lovedale in 1930,

in a somewhat bowdlerized version. It has since been republished

in more pristine form and is today considered not just the first

but one of the very best novels published by a black South African writer

in English.

Plaatje lived an extraordinary life but died a largely disappointed man.

His feats of political journalism had been largely forgotten

and his creative talents had hardly yet been recognised

-- except in the confined world of Tswana language readership.

But today Plaatje is regarded as a South African literary pioneer,

as a not insignificant political actor in his time,

and as a cogent commentator on his times. He was an explorer

in a fascinating world of cultural and linguistic interaction,

who was in retrospect truly a "renaissance man".